I didn't buy the first Buddha Machine -- a small musical loop player created by Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian of China-based music duo FM3 -- because, quite frankly, it seemed silly. Apart from the appeal of both its supposed novelty and its ability to annoy the culturally sheltered, there seemed no reason to pay more than $20 for what was apparently little more than a glorified music box. But whether it was the possibility of limited interactivity (variable pitch) or dementia, I bought Buddha Machine 2.0 soon after FM3 released it.
I listened through the loops haphazardly and was soon cursing myself, but I was still determined to get my money's worth. So after my laptop CPU stopped functioning (crashed? melted?) and I had nothing to do except read books I'd already read and write down thoughts I'd already written down, I decided to crank up the Buddha Machine, lie on my bed, and stare at the ceiling. I suppose it hadn't yet occurred to me until then to meditate with accompaniment. I cycled through the loops until the ninth and final loop came on, principally a ceaseless single interval -- minor third to root.
Twenty to thirty minutes later, any lingering thoughts I had ceased and the music became the primary focus of my attention. I listened intently for a few cycles of the loop before realizing that I was no longer hearing the same interval! The one I heard now was ascending, from the minor seventh to the root. I attempted to hear the original interval again, and it returned. I found that I had nearly perfect influence over the music -- if I anticipated the next interval to be ascending, it was ascending; if I anticipated it to be descending, it was descending. At some point, after my attention had waned, it again settled back into the original interval.
I would return to the ninth loop many times to test out my newfound power, and over the course of a couple sessions, I had learned to hear several different parts by bringing the background tones to the fore of my consciousness in different combinations. This process might sound obscure described in the deficient way that I have, but I hope by presenting what I think is a profound analogy to ambiguous visual illusions, I will be able to give a picture, however incomplete, of what phenomenon I experienced and how others could recreate it, either with the Buddha Machine or with some other source material.
Ambiguous illusions admit of more than one valid interpretation, each of which the viewer can see only in isolation. The Duck-Rabbit illusion (pictured above) is a drawing of an ambiguous animal head that either looks like a duck's head if the viewer concentrates on the long protrusion, which becomes the beak, or like a rabbit's head if the viewer concentrates on the other end, taking the protrusion as the ears. In figure-ground illusions, two fields share a border such that if the viewer concentrates on the former figure as negative space, a shape in the ground becomes apparent. In Rubin's vase, for instance, the sides of a white vase are also the silhouettes of symmetrical faces.
The Necker Cube, however, is most visually analogous to the Buddha Machine loop. The Necker Cube is a solid-line drawing of a cube whose depth orientation is ambiguous. For most people, including me, the lower-left face initially appears to be in front. Upon prompt or after looking at the drawing for long enough, the cube suddenly pops into the other perspective, where the lower-left face appears in back and the upper-right face in front. After seeing both interpretations, the viewer will be able to shift between them at will (even if with some difficulty) but cannot see them simultaneously. This oscillation over time is known as multistable perception.
The primary interval in the ninth Buddha Machine loop is like an auditory Necker Cube, lending itself to one interpretation at first glance but revealing, after some time of meditation, a second and equally valid interpretation perceived as a unique whole despite the constancy of the parts. When I first realized that the interval had “changed,” I thought that maybe the loop was 40 minutes long, but what had changed was my perspective. The loop is simple. There are, as far as I can tell, only four distinct lines, but depending on which line the listener focuses on, the overall perceptual experience changes drastically. In this way, the loop is like an extra-dimensional Necker Cube with a primary perceptual bistability and several contingent secondary oscillations.
I think that the multistability of the Buddha Machine can and should inform our listening practices. Pop music serves certain purposes, experimental music serves others, and I think that the Buddha Machine points to one possible goal of experimental music. Often, the latter has undermined technical, compositional, and intentional conventions, but the Buddha Machine presents a whole new field of exploration: the deconstruction of perceptual conventions. Traditionally, this practice has been most widely realized through the use of drugs and physiological alteration. LSD was an integral technology in the production of music throughout the '60s and '70s, and while it led to new techniques and sounds, the listener's experience was fundamentally untouched, unless she too underwent chemical transformation. While she might have never heard anyone play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix did, her perception was still passive. The sounds were different, the ears the same.
By contrast, the listener creates the auditory topology of the ninth Buddha Machine loop. Shepard scales and Shepard-Risset glissandi are fascinating auditory illusions but are in a sense unavoidable. M.C. Escher's drawings (above) are incredible, but many are deterministic in a similar way. The viewer is led to believe, because of visual cues, that the picture is progressing one way, only to find herself back where she started. The Buddha Machine illusion, on the other hand, is user-determined, partly because of its circularity and verbatim repetition and partly because of the rhythmic structure of the tones and their timbre.
Certainly, the Buddha Machine would not exist were it not for La Monte Young and Brian Eno -- at least for minimalist and ambient music -- and if a piece like Terry Riley's In C is played for a long enough duration and is the object of close enough attention, the listener might find herself playing with the overtones and interference beats in similar ways. However, the Buddha Machine bypasses the kind of natural changes that result from the inability of human performers to maintain a uniform spectral envelope, and so the play of differences is more wholly in the mind than in the vibrations.
While there might be innumerable intricacies and alternatively valid interpretations of so-called “songs,” the relative familiarity of their structures (which are mostly too linear to admit of meditative dwelling) makes the listener incidental, only a receptive field for the Work that requires an Author for completion. In a sense, Roland Barthes could never have written The Death of the Rock Star. The Buddha Machine, an unassuming little monochromatic rectangle, is the rock star's tombstone. Not really, of course, but it is at least a monument to the birth of possibility and the primacy of the listener. It is vital that the box's designers encourage consumers to use the loops as inspiration and source material (two spin-off albums have already been released). Virant and Jian have rightfully acceded to the transcendence of their “Text,” the perpetual discourse of reinterpretation that will accompany and renew the relevance of the Buddha Machine long after the popular music released the same year has been condemned to bargain bins.
[Email me if you know of other ambiguous auditory illusions, either in the remaining Buddha Machine loops or elsewhere.]
